Upgrading to WordPress 2.3 “Dexter”

September 25, 2007 by Michael

In the first place, i wanted to wait to here some more news about the latest release of WordPress, called “Dexter” (I don’t think about some saxophonist, but about Dexter Morgan). But, as you know, curiosity killed the cat, i couldn’t wait and with the announcement yesterday, i created a patch file (they forgot the link at wordpress.org) and patched my blog.

As danger is my second name, i didn’t backup or anything especially for upgrading (ok, honestly i have a nightly cron’ed backup) and run the patch with

Things, that didn’t work but didn’t break the blog either were: Ultimate Tag Warrior. It’s still there and still working. Things that didn’t work were my theme and the Extended Live Archives by Sons Of Skadi.

For testing purpose, i completely disabled wp-cache.

Luckily, someone had already patched ELA, you can download a modified version here, see it in action here. Be aware, you also need the original release from above. Before this thingy works, you need to clean it’s cache. Otherwise you’ll get some weird error messages.

Things i need to fix in my theme were UTW related. I imported my tags into the new taxonomic scheme and finally, dumped the warrior. The import worked well, but it killed the blanks in tags and replaced them with underscores. Thanks for that :/

The arguments to the functions corresponds with my former UTW settings. Speaking of which: WordPress 2.3 tagging system is completely naked. There are no settings and what is worse, there is no such thing as a dropdown thingy while writing, just a plain text field. As a first solution, i’ve tried the Advanced Tag Entry WordPress Plugin. Seems to work fine, but not as comfortable like UTW.

All other plugins i use, seem to work fine:

Advanced Tag Entry

1.02

Akismet

2.0.2

Chunk Urls for WordPress

2.0

Extended Live Archives

0.10beta-r18 (patched version)

FeedStats

3.0

Google Adsense widget

1.0

Google XML Sitemaps

3.0

Math Comment Spam Protection

2.1

Related Posts

2.04

Share This

1.4

Simple Trackback Validation

2.1

Subscribe To Comments

2.1.1

Tag cloud widget

1.0a (modified by myself)

Time Zone

2.2

wp-cache

2.1.2

WP-Syntax

0.6

In the meantime, i have the impression that 2.3 is somewhat slower than 2.2.3, but i can be wrong.

I’m in doubt about upgrading my other blog planet-punk.de. I like and do use tags a lot, but for the time being, the greatest db scheme doesn’t help a somewhat unusable ui. Don’t get me wrong, i really like the changes in the scheme going on, but for now, i see little benefit.

Another nice post with the same title as mine has some suggestions for people who ran into problems: read it at the Weblog Tools Collection.

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[…] Yesterday i’ve installed WordPress 2.3 without too much problems. The new uptodate check for plugins is nice, out of question, but already yesterday i thought: hm, everybody is whining about Microsoft products phoning home, nobody gives a shit about wordpress doing the same. […]